Running for Your Life: Townies vs. College Kids

Pardon the hockey head. It’s going on late April. I could fight it, but what’s the use?

My team is in it, the Pittsburgh Penguins. They are playing the Columbus Blue Jackets.

If you’ve watched this series at any length, the comparison above is apt. The Jackets are the townies; the Pens, the college kids.

It starts with the coaches, Sully, the good, and Torts, the bad (he famously says he prefers the company of dogs to people).

Downstate Ohio is Trump country to such a degree it helped swing the vote to The Donald’s favor in the US presidential election. Well, the counties surrounding Pittsburgh are equally for The Donald … And yeah, Pennsylvania went for Trump. For the record, both Columbus and Pittsburgh, as urban entities, went equally strong for Clinton.

Still, I would hazard to say the Jackets play the kind of he-man, hit-him-hard,    -harder, -hardest and often that would satisfy Trump’s notion of what to expect from a Rambo-style warrior. Pittsburgh, not so much.

What Pittsburgh does is play an “elite” style game. (Consider this akin to the word “liberal” in Trump country). The players they’ve been recruiting in the past few years predominantly come from American college ranks. Smaller, faster, and, dare I say it?, capable of smarter plays, than the townies.

What’s more, for Sully and the Pens, it doesn’t matter what the score is: up two goals or down two goals, they continue to push a college-style game, which is exciting to watch because it’s based on risky, offensive, what we used to call firewagon hockey, compared to the game preferred by the townies (ie, methodical, board-focused, grinding, with charging-through-the-walls heavy hits).

Here’s another comparison worthy of note. Trump was famously an underdog well into the late stages of the presidential election. As are the townies, the Jackets. They are down in the best of four Stanley Cup series, 3-1.

Can the Trump style pull off the upset in ice hockey that it did in the Electoral College? Can the townies repeat their role model’s feat and pummel the college kids into submission and ride to caveman victory? It will be telling to see.

Next: Running for Your Life: Balance Beam